The US is little more than $200bn away – or about 2 months – away from reaching its congressionally mandated national debt limit of $14,300bn.

The need to increase it to avoid a potentially disastrous US default is the next fiscal battleground in Washington, after the lawmakers stop squabbling over a government shutdown.

Republicans want to use the opportunity to push for more spending cuts, while Democrats say this is not the place to negotiate.

On Thursday, Moody’s Investors Service offered its analysis of the likelihood that a major crisis will ensue, threatening America’s triple-A credit rating much earlier than even the most ardent fiscal hawks would imagine. Read more

Only twice since the Bank gained independence has a sitting governor been outvoted. One was in August 2005, when the committee voted for a cut while the governor preferred a hold. In the other, two years later, the governor voted for a rate rise, and was outvoted to keep rates on hold. Might we be about to see a third case?

For the prosecution, three pieces of evidence. The first is the voting pattern. Never since the Bank gained independence has there been such a long period in which members of the committee have voted against the governor. Typically, there’s the odd vote for a change, while the governor and a majority prefer to hold. Demand for change then either grows – taking the governor with it – or fizzles out. But dissent has now lasted for nine consecutive Bank of England meetings – the longest on record. (The previous record was seven.)

James Bullard delivered an interesting, chart-rich speech on inflation, QE2 and global output gaps on Thursday. The now non-voting St Louis Fed President was a strong advocate of QE2 as a way to reverse alleged deflationary pressures. Bullard hits back at those claiming the Fed is importing inflation, saying — as Ben Bernanke did in Paris on Friday — that some “countries are choosing to import US monetary policy to some extent”.

But — and now we get to the really interesting bit of the presentation — Bullard does wonder whether the US should consider ‘the global output gap’. As John Kemp pointed out in his column on Thursday morning:

It is the first time a senior official at the U.S. central bank has acknowledged global capacity issues rather than a narrow focus on U.S. unemployment and capacity utilisation might give a better indication of where inflation is headed.

Bullard uses the following chart to suggest that “the global ouput gap is probably much narrower or even positive”:

Russia’s finance minister has indicated a preference for a hike in interest rates when the board meets on Friday. Governments are often pro-growth, with central banks taking the unpopular – and sometimes anti-growth – decisions needed to fight inflation. Not in this case. “The central bank is independent, but I think it is the time to take additional measures,” Russia’s finance minister Alexei Kudrin told the BBC, Reuters news wire reports.

Waiting for a German consumer boom is like… contributions welcome for the most appropriate metaphor. Whatever the comparison, it is not happening yet. Disappointingly for those hoping for a re-balancing, details just released of last week’s fourth quarter gross domestic product data show German growth continued to be driven mainly by exports.

The balance between exports and imports contributed 0.7 percentage points to growth in the fourth quarter. This was offset by a sharp, weather-related fall in construction and a run-down in stocks.

Despite steadily falling unemployment, low interest rates and soaring economic confidence in Europe’s largest economy, consumer spending rose by a measly 0.2 per cent compared with the previous three months, down from 0.5 per cent in the third quarter. Read more

Guy Quaden, Belgium’s central bank governor, announced last night that he will step down on March 31. “It is time the government can provide stable leadership to the Bank in preparation for the transfer of the prudential supervision of banks,” he said. A likely successor is the vice governor, Luc Coene.

Whether the government is able to secure stability at the Bank is unclear. Mr Quaden should have retired last Autumn but problems forming a government in Belgium required him to stay in his post. There hasn’t been much improvement since then. Attempts to form a coalition after the June election failed in September. Chief political mediator Johan Vande Lanotte stepped down in January. Some agreement has been made on austerity measures after markets started to fret about Belgian debt, pushing up the cost of debt for the tiny nation by almost a third. Politically, the country is still in crisis, recently passing 249 days – a record – without a government.

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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS

Claire Jones is the FT's Eurozone economy correspondent, based in Frankfurt. Prior to this, she was an economics reporter in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS

Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS

Sarah O’Connor is the FT’s economics correspondent in London. Before that, she was a Lex writer, covered the US economy from Washington and the Icelandic banking collapse from Reykjavik. Sarah studied Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University and joined the FT in 2007. RSS

Ferdinando Giugliano is the FT's global economy news editor, based in London. Ferdinando holds a doctorate in economics from Oxford University, where he was also a lecturer, and has worked as a consultant for the Bank of Italy, the Economist Intelligence Unit and Oxera. He joined the FT in 2011 as a leader writer. RSS

Emily Cadman is an economics reporter at the FT, based in London. Prior to this, she worked as a data journalist and was head of interactive news at the Financial Times. She joined the FT in 2010, after working as a web editor at a variety of news organisations.
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Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS

Ben McLannahan covers markets and economics for the FT from Tokyo, and before that he wrote Lex notes from London and Hong Kong. He studied English at Cambridge University and joined the FT in 2007, after stints at the Economist Group and Institutional Investor. RSS